Nets I – XVIII, 2024
Watercolour on paper
EMΣΤ Collection
Acquired 2025
Navine Dossos’s most recent work is grounded in a profound engagement with ecology, exploring how art can help reframe our relationship to the natural world. The work presented here consists of watercolours of different types of fishing net that hold landscape paintings within them. The series began after a trip Dossos took to northwest Crete, during which she visited the ruins of a temple dedicated to the little-known goddess Dyktinna. It is said that Dyktinna escaped the advances of King Minos by throwing herself into the sea, where she was caught in the nets of local fishermen, who took her to safety on the island of Aegina. Net imagery, long connected with fertility goddesses, holds special significance in their mythologies as it symbolises the matrix of creation, the means to catch food, and the network within which everything in the universe is intertwined. Here, we can also appreciate the remarkable diversity of fishnet designs that have been developed throughout Greece, reflecting a rich tradition of fishing practices and the ingenuity of generations of fishermen.
The premise of the series is to use the net or grid as a basis for the paintings of the Cretan landscapes surrounding the temple of Dyktinna that Dossos photographed during her visit. In these works, the fishermen’s nets, the matrix, the grid, the rhizome, the network, all converge, positioning the Goddess as a deeply ancient form of connection to the earth and ecology.
Navine G. Dossos was born in London. She lives and works on the island of Aegina, Greece.
